


The unopened Book

by thelongcon (rainer76)



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: A coda to "Coda" episode 8, Gen, Rick/Daryl if you squint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 00:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2753390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainer76/pseuds/thelongcon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A coda to Coda - episode eight, genish with Rickyl elements</p>
            </blockquote>





	The unopened Book

Rick’s never sided himself with the fearless, never thought - _this don’t scare me none_ \- he’s plenty terrified. 

It’s weird; setting foot in Atlanta, for all their running from bolt-hole to bolt-hole they were situated less than two hours drive from the city.  The quality of air’s not the same - the buzzards don’t quit, black and misshapen, and the stink is engrained - it bleeds out of the brick mortar, wafts through the air like a visible contrail.  High summer heat followed by the rainy season and everything here feels fetid, layered in filth. The city’s a carcass, bare-bone infrastructure, and whatever’s left clinging to the remains has rotted through.

Rick guns the engine and feels the judder of impact, the bright gleam of handcuffs caught in the sunlight, the spine arched in flight.  He hits the brakes, more by instinct than forethought. (The more calculating part of his mind would have urged him to run the body down on the asphalt, finish it without any parting words to be said), but his foot slams on the brake even as Bob twists, legs flung out wide as he bounces and rolls, the car fishtails behind him.

Bob’s one of the good guys, Rick hears in the back of his head, Noah’s voice sounding so earnest and young, and Rick thinks _bullshit._   Good guys don’t sit on the sidelines and do nothing.  Good guys wouldn’t turn a blind eye to slavery (or wards or whatever fine ass word Dawn’s chosen to use) and be okay with it.   They wear the uniform Rick put away so long ago as if it means something; blind to the words emblazoned on the badge – to protect, to serve – to make the hard decisions and stand by it; these people don’t sacrifice a damn thing, and being ‘nice’ to the wards doesn’t exclude Bob, it doesn’t make him a good guy by default, if anything, he’s unwillingness to change Dawn’s system just paints him as a different kind of coward. Rick ain’t a good guy, he hasn’t thought of himself in those terms since the farm, and whatever terrors he entertains they’re not of the same ilk as Bob’s.

The car door swings opens with a creak of rusted metal. Rick steps out of the police vehicle, his gait predatory as he stalks forward.

“Help me, help me you son of a bitch,” Bob murmurs.  There’s blood at the corner of his mouth, chin scraped raw from the impact, his legs lie perpendicular to his torso.  Rick doesn’t feel it; not with the same empathy he might have held, years ago.  He’s a one-strike kind of a guy and Bob batted out the instant he struck Sasha.  Rick comes to a stop three feet away, one hand at his colt, eyes narrowed. Bob blinks tears out of his eyes,  “I think…I think you broke my back,” he says, wretchedly.

There are walkers at the end of the street; the road is littered with debris; too many points of egress, the potential of an attack riding high in the back of his mind.  Rick feels his fingers twitch, his voice mild as he spares Bob a glance. “Didn’t have to be like this. All you had to do was stop.”

Bob lets out a sound, sob or a laugh, his expression incredulous and pained. “I couldn’t.  I don’t _know_ you but I think…I think I’m getting the idea.”  You would have done the same, he seems to imply, you would have fought back at the first opportunity too, don’t know you means I don’t trust you, and it’s all the same. 

Rick doesn’t know.  His sense of right and wrong can be mercurial depending on the situation, but he’s certain none of this would have occurred if Bob honoured the agreement to begin with; if he hadn’t attacked one of Rick’s own. He stirs, the sweat rolls down his neck, pools in his collarbones, his fingers flex around the grip of his gun, and he repeats steadfast, unforgiving as the pavement he’s crouched on: “You just had to stop.”

“Take me back to the hospital,” Bob pleads. Legs gone and back broken; as if Dawn would carry his dead weight; as if they’d waste the resources on someone who couldn’t contribute to the system.  More than that though; Rick doesn’t know how Dawn would react if she knew what had happened - if running Bob down was cause for an all-out war - or if she’d take retribution from Beth, blood for blood and body for body. It’s easier if he’s just another skeleton buried in the ground, and Rick sees the realisation hit Bob’s face the second he speaks the words, his tone gone despairing.  “I get it you’re afraid…”

“No,” Rick says, and it’s easier without Daryl here, to do this alone, to stare at the body he broke and say.  “Not after this.” 

The hospital ain’t an option, not if Bob’s state jeopardizes Beth’s life, and a broken spine isn’t anything Rick or Dawn or anyone else can fix.  It’s a brutal fact with a far worse resolution. 

At the end of the street, the walkers snarl and stutter forward.  Rick draws his weapon.

Hatred flares in Bob’s eyes, a last measure of defiance as he confesses.  “I was going to iron things out… make the swap happen.”  He’s one of the good guys, Noah confirms.  I was the peacemaker, his words reform. “But she’s under it,” gone too far, twisted out of shape,  “and you’ve been out here too long.”  His teeth snap shut, Bob’s face twists into a death mask, because there ain’t no resolution between these two parties, and he wants to drive his death home, how pointless it is, in what time he has left:  “You’ll die, you’ll all di…”

All he had to do was stop, Rick reasons.

The bullet cuts Bob off; the sharp retort echoing off the buildings and down the littered streets.  Blood fills the air.  The walkers groan, gnash their teeth; they surge forward urgently as Rick walks away.  Numbed to it, he leaves the walkers to their feast and slips into the patrol vehicle.

The engine turns over without a hitch. Rick hooks an arm over the driver’s headrest, body twisted at an angle, and reverses back up the road, his attention fixed on the others, on Sasha, Tyresse, and Noah - on the two cops Bob didn’t bother to release in his rush to escape – and lastly, on Daryl.

He’s intimate with all sorts of fears. Leadership used to plague Rick; the idea his decision might cost a life.  Retribution keeps its own tally and he feared for the people under his charge – who would pay for his error – what if he killed them all by mistake? Forsaken, he knows the mind-numbing fear of waking up alone in the hospital - and for all the horrors that have been visited upon him since -Rick’s never felt such keen terror again. Never to such devastating effect as that first day.

The most visceral fear was simple: he never imagined he could survive Lori’s death - or the passing of Judith or Carl – he would have folded into the concrete and never moved again…yet he crawled out of the basement, he marched down a dusty road when the Governor razed the fences to the ground. Of all the terrors he’s harboured that was the most potent; Rick didn’t’ know he had it inside of himself to continue afterward, but he did, he does, and he will. 

He’s never sided with the fearless, his spine snaps taut every time they encounter someone new.  It’s a noose around his throat, teeth bared with the ever present threat, and if there’s any difference between Gabriel and himself then it can be found in the knowledge that being afraid has _never_ frozen Rick to the ground.  He’ll dance on the end of his tether.  Defiant, he’ll swing wild; jangle to the skeleton tune.  Yeah, people scare him but he didn’t feel the noose when he planned the ambush on the hospital.  He wasn’t scared of going toe-to-toe with the left-over dregs in a sorry excuse for a uniform, not if it meant recovering Beth and Carol from their grasp. Rick could see how it would play out, the death count clear in his own mind, he knew how to get it done with the least chance of fatalities on their end (the only end that mattered).  There’s anticipation, adrenalin, a clear-headed determination to his plan, but fear didn’t touch Rick until Daryl said from behind ‘Nah, we do it like he says’ and then the scaffolding dropped out from underneath Rick and the noose jerked tight.

It’s the first moment of unbridled terror Rick’s felt in days – Daryl’s constant support slipping out from under him - his perception a dizzy spin.  Rick relents, he concedes to Tyresse without a murmur, hoping for the pressure to release, that his vision wouldn’t spiral into darkness.

 

***

 

“Why do you think she did it?” Daryl asks.

They’re on the road, Judith a sleeping bundle, curled into Rick’s chest as they walk.  Daryl’s hand clenches around the crossbow strap, tugging the weight down restlessly before he releases it.  Maggie’s further ahead; she’s been mute for days now, a feverish glint to her eyes, Glenn hovers close by, oddly enough, Abraham orbits Maggie too, his mouth pulled tight, shoulders hitched like a bull.

When Rick thinks of Beth; it’s the girl on the farm who’s conjured in his mind, it’s not fair to her, it’s certainly not accurate, but there was something about Beth that remained untouched, preserved and forever youthful.  The brightness of her smile; her disinterest in going on runs, the way her song would float through the prison cells, Rick thought of her as a daughter first, another kid to be protected, younger than Carl when his own son was in such a hurry to grow up, but he doesn’t know how Beth changed on the road, the few days she spent with Daryl and how it might have altered her, Rick doesn’t know what experiences defined Beth in the hospital.

_I get it now_ , she had said, and that was the only clue Rick could run with.

She’d never killed a human, not up close and personal, she drove the scissors into Dawn’s shoulder instead of her heart and Rick feels his eyes slip shut because he’ll never know if that’s what Beth intended or if her nerves had slipped.  She was her father’s daughter; after all, Beth knew where to aim.

And he can remember the way Dawn had scrambled to apologise, trying to form the words, reflex to injury, the flinch that had tightened Dawn’s finger on the trigger, until Beth was nothing but a smear of blood and brain matter.  I didn’t mean… Blood for blood and body for body, Daryl had sent Dawn to join her ward on the chequered floor before Dawn finished the sentence.

Maybe she was angry - for the first time since Rick had known Beth - maybe she was really, _truly_ , angry.  Surrounded by her family; maybe she was overly cocky they could protect her in their numbers; maybe Beth wanted to show them how much she had changed, no longer a child but an active participant; maybe she wasn’t thinking at all.  Maybe Beth didn’t see the angle of Dawn’s gun, or anticipate a person’s natural reaction to pain.  Maybe she was trying to protect Noah, above all else; maybe she wanted the war for his sake. None of those answers will comfort Maggie and they won’t quiet the rage thrumming through Daryl’s bones.

Good guys don’t sit on the sidelines and _allow_ things to happen, and in the end, maybe that’s the only eulogy Beth needs.

Rick curls a hand around Daryl’s bicep, squeezes once, and says roughly, in lieu of nothing.  “She was brave.”

Daryl’s eyes narrow.  He shrugs his arm loose, turning on his heel to walk backward, eyes sweeping the brush:  “How’s Carl?”

His son had carried a torch for Beth since before the prison fell.  Carl cried at the burial, shouldered his pack the next day, and walks near the apex of the group now. Alert. 

“Coping,” Rick decides upon, and then grimaces, “as much as anyone.”

“Shoulda listened to you,” Daryl says, under his breath.

Rick breathes the heavy air in, fills his lungs to the maximum until he’s light-headed, then shrugs.  “We don’t know that,” he says, and bends his head to make eye contact.  “We can’t ever know that…and it’s madness second guessing every decision we make along the way. Believe me, brother, that’s one thing I know for sure.”

Daryl studies him out of the corner of his vision before he draws to a stop.  Rick falters, shifting Judith’s weight to his opposite arm, and cocks his head to the side. 

“Carol reckons I was no more than a kid when we met,” Daryl says, his delivery dry as a bone

It’s not what Rick was expecting, makes his mouth twitch, how flatly Daryl says it.  Rick doesn’t like dwelling on the past, thinking about how Daryl used to be inevitably means thinking about how Rick used to be, and it’s hard to reconcile those two men, the small steps that led to incremental changes, that shaped who they are now.  Thinking about the beginning means thinking about Shane, and Rick wants to curl a hand around his brother’s nape, touch their foreheads together and breathe him in. He aches with the loss like it’s a physical limb, wants to say Shane was a dumbass, he wants to say he was right about so many things in the end, but by god his delivery was naught for crap.

Or maybe it was Shane’s timing.

In some ways, his partner was always ahead of the game. “Yeah?” Rick says, neutrally, because there’s no way he’ll agree with Carol’s sentiment out loud.

Daryl casts an eye toward the sky, watching the clouds scud across the horizon.  “Yeah,” he parrots. He readjusts the backpack, lets it slip from his shoulder, and takes a swig from his water bottle.

Rick drinks when he passes it over, puts his mouth where Daryl’s was and lets the water rush down his dry throat. Tara and Eugene walk by, engrossed in their own conversation, and Daryl waits until they’re out of earshot before he says.  “Been thinking about Merle a lot, and me old man, been thinking growing up is putting others first…and that’s something you’ve always done, something Beth knew…. something I had to learn.”

Rick tenses; he searches the other man’s expression quickly.  Daryl doesn’t talk about his old man, but his been off kilter since the Claimers, and he doesn’t know what this is about.  Rick wants to touch him again, regain his sense of footing.  “Deserve a little more credit than that.”

Daryl’s mouth tics, a faint smile as he makes eye contact.  He recaps the water bottle, opens the flap to his pack and dumps it inside. In the same motion, he pulls out a book and thrusts it at Rick’s chest.  “You can do it; I ain’t having this discussion with Carl.”

At a loss, Rick turns the cover over. The title is clinical, bold: **Treating Survivors of Childhood Abuse** , and Rick feels his blood run cold, his hand clench tight.

Daryl shifts, moving to the balls of his feet, there’s an edge to his voice that Rick can’t place; a reminder that this is the same man who saved Judith’s life when Rick was paralysed by Lori’s death, who cracked Carl’s brittle edges, and got his son to _talk_ about pulling the trigger.

The book weighs heavy in his palm.  Startled, Rick looks up.

“My old man’s thirty years in the ground; what he’s done, what he did, don’t much matter to me, and hell, not in whatever’s left of this world.  It doesn’t mean a damn thing.”  Daryl bites his lip, and says in a rush.  “But it’s different for Carl, it’s fresh for Carl, what they done, what they threatened him with…it ain’t something you ignore.  So the book’s for your boy, or if you want, it’s for you, however you wanna handle it…jus’…don’t pull a Merle and bury your head in the sand, ‘kay?  It don’t work,” Daryl tips an eye toward the book, says ruefully,  “and hopefully, Carl’s young enough for it to make a difference.”

It’s not a noose around his throat, it’s not a constriction he can’t breathe through, Rick feels his chest tighten, the air hot as a brand.  He thinks about changing, moving forward, never letting fear hold you still to the ground, he thinks about how young he thought Beth was and how much younger, in reality, Carl still is, and swallows hard.   He feels Daryl’s arm curl around his shoulder, feels it when the other man shakes him slightly, and feels the ground resolidify around him. Rick looks toward Carl, his face aged with another kind of sorrow and says:  “Yeah…. I don’t track with cowards.”

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
